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Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees' needs and rights. This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world.

In this talk, Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Professor Gil Loescher, two of the Handbook's editors, will discuss how the book provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. Laying out the thinking behind the Handbook, they will examine how it addresses these challenges and attempts to unify a diverse, evolving and crucial field.

Professor Loescher and Dr Fiddian-Qasmiyeh will be joined by a number of the Handbook's authors, who will reflect on their own contributions to the volume and highlight some of cutting-edge approaches and challenges emerging in their respective areas of expertise.

Order your copy of the Handbook online from Oxford University Press by 30 December 2014 and receive a 30% discount. Click here for details.

Light refreshments will be provided after the event.

about the speakers

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Lecturer in Human Geography at University College London. She joined UCL in September 2014, having formerly been a Senior Research Officer at the International Migration Institute (IMI) and a Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration at the Refugee Studies Centre, both at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the intersections between gender, generation and religion in experiences of and responses to forced migration and statelessness, with a particular regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. She has conducted extensive research in refugee camps and urban areas including in Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, France, Lebanon, South Africa, Syria, Sweden, and the UK.

Her recent publications include The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival (Syracuse University Press, January 2014) and The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, a major co-edited 53 chapter volume published by Oxford University Press in June 2014. Elena's second book, South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development: Views from the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East, will be published by Routledge in January 2015.

Elena is one of the Series Editors of the new Palgrave Religion and Global Migrations book series and has been the Reviews Editor of the Journal of Refugee Studies since 2011. In January 2013, she was awarded the Lisa Gilad Prize by the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) for 'the most innovative and thoughtful contribution to the advancement of refugee studies' in 2011 and 2012. The prize was awarded in recognition of her 2011 article 'The pragmatics of performance: putting 'faith' in aid in the Sahrawi refugee camps' (Journal of Refugee Studies, 24,3).

Gil Loescher is Visiting Professor at the Refugee Studies Centre. He is a long-established expert on international refugee policy. For over 25 years, he was Professor of International Relations at the University of Notre Dame in the United States and was a visiting fellow at Princeton University, LSE, Oxford and the Department of Humanitarian Affairs at the US State Department in Washington DC.

In recent years Gil has been Senior Research Fellow, Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford, Senior Fellow for Forced Migration and International Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and a senior researcher at the European Council on Refugees and Exiles.

He has served as a consultant to numerous governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, foundations and research institutes. Gil has been the recipient of numerous research, writing and teaching grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Twentieth Century Fund, the US Institute for Peace, the MacArthur Foundation, the Fulbright programme, the British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation, the British Council and other foundations.